Publisher's Summary

Sit back, turn the lights down low, and get ready for the scare of your life. Immerse yourself into some of the best horrifying short stories ever told. 21 Short Stories from '31 Horrifying Tales from the Dead' includes "Don't Mess with the Dead", "Don't Go in the Woods", "Death Island Lighthouse", "I Just Couldn't Leave Her in the Cold Dark Ground", "Cannibal Lake", "The Red Room", "Death of a Writer", "Army of the Dead", "The Shadowman", "Knock Three Times on My Grave", "Worley Manor", "The Premature Burial Grounds", "Dead Man's Chest", "The Castle of Black Shadows", "The House of Death", "Rise of the Zombies", "Campfire Tales", "Captain Bloody Bones", "Curse of the Evil Fairies Fort", "The Garden of the Dead", and "The Inheritance".

I've seen a lot of stories by Drac Von Stoller popping up on audible lately, so when a collection of more than about 8 or so came along, I ventured a credit to see what was what. I listened - grimly - to the entire collection, though I could tell in the first five minutes or so that I was going to hate it, but I wanted to give it a fair try before passing judgement. It really wasn't worth the effort. The stories might be kindly described as the kind of thing a primary school student might be proud of writing in the year or so leading up to secondary school. Perhaps that's who it's aimed at.

It's not that Von Stoller's ideas aren't imaginative, they're just poorly, or maybe just too simply, executed. Take an example: the main character of one of the stories is wandering up to the locked room at the top of a lighthouse of a mansion he's just inherited or bought (I forget which) - "Suddenly from behind door emerged Dr Death!". Those aren't the exact words, but that's how basic the style is. Dr Death hasn't featured at all in the story up until then, and there follows a long expositional section about who he is, etc. It's the kind of thing that'd be handled by rumours or maybe a chance-discovered journal or newspaper cuttings in almost any other horror story I can think of, just laid out in such a way that I'm thinking "and why does that matter?" all the way through. Dialogue feels clumsy and false, and is sometimes forced in as exposition to the plot. Maybe he's going for a children's fable feel, in the Bluebeard vein, but if so, the style lacks the sort of charm it would need to become appealing.

Drac Von Stoller also appears in person a few times - it's both crude & self-aggrandising, and I find it a bit sickening, maybe that's just me.

Summing up then - I really didn't like it. I kept wondering how it got published, that was how much I disliked it. Maybe it's aimed at a younger audience and I didn't notice, but even so, poor.